Monks vs Cannibals

Deep Under the Hood

Most games are built in high-level engines like Unity or Godot. This one was built in Jack, a Java-like language designed specifically to be compiled down to a custom 16-bit virtual machine as part of the legendary Nand2Tetris course.

The Game

The classic logic puzzle: Three monks and three cannibals must cross a river using a boat that can carry at most two people. If the cannibals ever outnumber the monks on either side of the river, the monks get eaten, and it’s game over.

Technical Execution

Because Jack runs on a highly constrained simulated hardware platform, every visual and logical element had to be meticulously managed:

• Direct Memory Manipulation: Sprites and graphics are drawn by directly manipulating the screen memory map.
• Custom Event Loops: No standard libraries here—keyboard polling, game state updates, and rendering cycles were all written from scratch.
• Memory Efficiency: The 16-bit hardware environment enforces strict memory constraints, requiring highly optimized object-oriented design and garbage collection workarounds.

Why Jack?

Building this game was the ultimate test of understanding the entire computing stack—from boolean logic gates and CPU architecture, all the way up to high-level game design.